Hearing-impaired individuals may benefit from communication systems and devices configured to provide assistance in order to communicate with other individuals over a communication network. For example, relay services have been established to provide assistive services (e.g., text captions) to the hearing-impaired user communicating with a communication device (e.g., caption phone, caption enabled device, etc.) that is specifically configured to communicate with the relay service.
In particular, a relay service may be a telecommunication intermediary service, which is intended to permit a deaf or a hearing-impaired person to utilize a normal telephone network. The relay service may include an operator, referred to as a “call assistant,” who serves as a human intermediary between the hearing-impaired user and a far-end user. During a captioning communication session, the call assistant may listen to the audio signal of a far-end user and “revoice” the words of the far-end user to a speech recognition computer program tuned to the voice of the call assistant. Text captions (also referred to as “captions”) may be generated by the speech recognition computer as a transcription of the audio signal of the far-end user, and then transmitted to the communication device being used by the hearing-impaired user. The communication device may then display the text captions while the hearing-impaired user carries on a normal conversation with the far-end user. The text captions may allow the hearing-impaired user to supplement the voice received from the far-end and confirm his or her understanding of the words spoken by the far-end user.
In some situations, the text captions may be transmitted to the user's communication device over a separate network than the voice signal from the far end. During a captioning communication session, there may be a problem with the network that may cause the captioning communication session between the hearing-impaired user's communication device and the relay service to terminate. As a result, the hearing-impaired user's communication device may no longer receive and display the text captions. The termination of the connection may not have been initiated or desired by the user, and the user may lose the benefit of the text captions. Conventionally, the user may need to press a caption button to start another captioning communication session with the relay service to again start to receive the text captions.